Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty

By Max H. Bazerman, Francesca Gino. 2012

280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Early research and teaching on ethics focused either on a moral development perspective or on philosophical approaches and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this article, we briefly describe the traditional approach to ethics and then present a (biased) review of the behavioral approach to ethics. We define behavioral ethics as the study of systematic and predictable ways in which individuals make ethical decisions and judge the ethical decisions of others when these decisions are at odds with intuition and the benefits of the broader society. By focusing on a descriptive rather than a normative approach to ethics, behavioral ethics is better suited than traditional approaches to addressing the increasing demand from society for a deeper understanding of what causes even good people to cross ethical boundaries.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Health Professions, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8280021cc5be446f2d5dd47aed9b4d28473f235d

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Citations in the corpus

Unethical use of wildlife in tourism: what's the problem, who is responsible, and what can be done? (2017, background): “A large body of research has demonstrated inconsistencies between people’s desire to be good and moral (and be seen as such by others) and their actual unethical behaviour (Bazerman & Gino, 2012).”
Understanding ordinary unethical behavior: why people who value morality act immorally (2015, unknown): “Though different in many ways, these streams of behavioral ethics research share two empirically supported assumptions [1].”
Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “…organizational this gap by focusing on interpersonal rather than intrapersonal processes affecting moral judgment and behavior, a topic of increasing interest in organizational scholarship (Bazerman & Gino, 2012) and of increasing importance in organizational practice (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011).”
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work (2015, background): “…1997), even though leading scholars in the area of ethical decision making have noted the importance of taking more crossdisciplinary approaches, integrating across constructs, topics and issues that span academic fields (Bazerman & Gino, 2012; Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008; Treviño et al., 2006).”
Moral character: What it is and what it does (2014, background): “…the question of ‘‘what is ethical’’ has been the subject of much debate and definitional ambiguity within the organizational behavior literature (Bazerman & Gino, 2012; Brief, 2012; Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008), there is now growing consensus among psychologists that what is right versus…”
Self-Serving Justifications (2015, background): “Recently, the fields of social and cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and management have shifted direction and endorsed a more descriptive approach, focusing on how individuals actually behave when facing temptations to behave unethically (Bazerman & Gino, 2012).”
In Search of Phronesis: Leadership and the Art of Judgment (2014, background): “While the “moral context” (Bazerman & Gino, 2012: 89) of the case is indisputable, or at least Olson appears to exhibit “moral awareness” (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008: 555), insofar as moral considerations are clearly present in her mind, her puzzlement as to what she needs to do is not a…”